I entirely misjudged how long it would take me to drive to Los Angeles, and by the time I got in, it was very late. It was late enough that Rob Swindell's wife got on the phone when I called in and said it would probably be a good idea for me to sleep somewhere, and not risk crashing the car pushing myself. As it was, I was less than 20 miles from their house at that point, so I went for it. Rob and his wife were very gracious to have me show up so late for an interview, and although the footage doesn't demonstrate it, it is in fact not an appropriate hour for people to be showing up with cameras.
That situation aside, the interview with Rob went very well. He is the creator and the continuing developer of Synchronet, which makes it one of the only commercial packages to both switch to free software and still be maintained by the original developer. While I've interviewed a lot of developers who used to work on their packages, many have either lost the rights or no longer do work on them. Therefore, his perspective is a little different.
We covered a number of subjects, including his days with WWIV boards and the boards that affected him, up to the running of his BBS company, Digital Dynamics, and their part of the BBS industry. He was less than enthused about how his company was treated compared to other companies, but came away from the whole thing with a positive outlook ("it supported me and some employees for a couple of years"). His infant daughter sat in on the interview (that is, she slept nearby) and his cat had a few things it wanted on camera as well.
It was a solid interview, and a great addition.
